Museum der Kulturen Basel

In order to immerse in the spiritual realm in everyday life, people rely on a variety of means: candles, figurines or images support believers in prayer and meditation beyond the sphere of churches ...

From delicate feather work to heavy beer pots; items in many different shapes and forms and made of unusual materials. Museum collections are archives of human creativity. But who are these people ...

How do different societies imagine the transition from this world to the beyond? How do they configure it, and what path does a soul or a deceased person set out on? The exhibition explores what lies ...

Gold brings a glitter to Christmas trees, embellishes precious items, and stands for holiness. But where there’s light, there’s also shadow. The mining of this precious metal leaves deep scars across ...

Remembering and forgetting are ever-present features of life. The exhibition playfully reveals the manifold practices people rely on to recall specific moments in life, from birth to death, but also ...

Colours make the world look bright. But do we all perceive and experience them in the same way? In a flight across the museum’s collection, our pink owl spotted a range of colourful objects and now ...

Shibori refers to a fabric patterning technique. In Japanese, shiboru means to compress or wring, and describes how unique patterns are created by folding, tying, and sewing. After dyeing, all the ...

The climate crisis poses a threat to the habitability of the Earth, and has prompted a rethink of the perspectives, networks, and interactions of human and non-human actors. How do we humans perceive ...

Set in historical rooms, the Museum offers a colourful overview of the world-famous Basel carnival – ranging from costumes, lanterns, masks, and musical instruments, to historical documents and a ...